Free Republic

Today is the day, that our trade figures were released for 2013. Once again, America has failed to gain any appreciable trade volume, vs China. Go into any American store, look on any shelf, and all the stuff is "Made in China". The big problem is: in China, all the things are "Made in China" as well.

You may never heard of it but "The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a trade agreement that is presently being secretly negotiated between the European Union and the United States. It aims at removing trade barriers in a wide range of economic sectors to make it easier to buy and sell goods and services between the EU and the US. On top of cutting tariffs across all sectors, the EU and the US want to tackle barriers behind the customs border – such as differences in technical regulations, standards and approval procedures. These often cost unnecessary time and...

Legislation key to President Barack Obama’s agenda to boost exports to the fast-growing economies of the Asia-Pacific is being welcomed by business but faces stiff opposition from Obama’s fellow Democrats. A bill to grant the president “fast track” authority for negotiating trade deals was introduced Thursday, co-sponsored by a senior Democrat and two leading Republicans. Fast track, which was last approved in 2002 and expired in 2007, assures that the administration can negotiate trade deals that Congress can accept or reject but cannot change.The administration will be counting on strong support from Republicans, who traditionally are more supportive of free...

China is poised to become the world's top trading nation, a position long held by the United States. China reported Friday that its total trade for 2013 reached $4.2 trillion, a sharp increase over the previous year. It is the first time the world's most populous country has cleared the $4 trillion barrier, a feat accomplished despite lackluster numbers for the final month of the year. The U.S. has not yet reported trade numbers for December, but China is virtually assured the top ranking. In the first 11 months of the year, U.S. imports and exports totaled $3.5 trillion, according...

  Home / Breaking News / USTR Report: Chinese Government Creates Friction for Global Trade Dan Ritter Google+ Twitter | More Articles December 29, 2013 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timokl/ China’s economic development depends as much on international diplomacy as it does on domestic investment and political reform. According to state-run news agency Xinhua, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said earlier this month that one of China’s top economic priorities for 2014 will be economic diplomacy, conducted with the goal of capitalizing on opportunities to grow both the domestic and global economy.It’s hard to understate the increasingly important role that China plays in...

US Secretary of State John Kerry will offer Israeli and Palestinian negotiators a political trade-off: Israeli recognition of the 1967 lines as a basis for the future Palestinian state, in return for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, Palestinian sources told the Saudi daily Al-Watan on Sunday. According to the sources, the mutual recognition will constitute the core of a framework agreement to be signed by the end of January, and negotiated in greater detail during the following months. "The coming weeks will be difficult for the Palestinian and Israeli sides, since they will need...

Twenty years ago, millions of Americans were cocking their ears — waiting to hear a "giant sucking sound."They feared Mexico would begin vacuuming up U.S. manufacturing jobs as soon as President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, on Dec. 8, 1993. The "sucking sound" famously had been forecast in 1992 by Ross Perot, the businessman turned independent presidential candidate.Clinton won the election, and began pushing for NAFTA's passage. He promised the sprawling trade agreement would become a wealth generator as it pulled together the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico.Who turned out to be...

One thing we can say about Barack Obama is that he is a proven liar. He lied when he told Americans we could keep our health insurance if we liked it. Now he wants us to trust him on something else. For the last several years, the Obama Administration has been negotiating something called the Trans Pacific Partnership. The Trans Pacific Partnership is a free trade agreement on steroids. In 1992, then-Presidential candidate Ross Perot coined the expression, “Giant sucking sound” to describe the exodus of jobs from America into Mexico if the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed....

The Obama administration is secretly negotiating a treaty that could have significant effects on domestic law. Officially, it's a "free trade" treaty among Pacific rim countries, but a section of the draft agreement leaked in 2011 suggested that it will require signers, including the United States, to make significant changes to copyright law and enforcement measures. **SNIP** Now, as Maira Sutton at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, the New York Times editorial board has endorsed the TPP. While the editorial acknowledges that some are "worried about provisions on intellectual property that could restrict the availability of generic medicines and...

"The new data show that consumer demand surged in the United States just as it lagged in the European Union and China. The value of goods and services imported to the U.S. increased to $228.6 billion, while exports dipped to $189.4 billion." Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/china-drives-uptick-in-us-trade-deficit-96257.html#ixzz2hKHVkSeH

In a recent op-ed in The Detroit News, Teamsters President James Hoffa criticized trade deals in the United States saying, “It is time America’s major import wasn’t cheap foreign goods and its major export wasn’t good U.S. jobs.” Hoffa used the South American country of Colombia to make his point, saying that exports to the U.S. from Colombia fell 4.5 percent between May 2012 and March 2013. But if Hoffa is implying that the U.S., and Michigan, are being hurt by trade deals, he won’t find much support from the Department of Commerce. For example, exports from the U.S. to...

The global cabal of U.N. Agenda 21 is behind global warming, regionalism, zoning, land and water use control, wealth redistribution, weakening and eventual replacement of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, global warming, cap and trade, Smart Grid, Smart Meters, carbon taxes, high gasoline prices, global citizens, IB World Schools, Common Core nationalized education standards, biofuels, Marxist advancement across the globe, food control, water access control via the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), gun control, health control, the Arab Spring/Winter, unchecked illegal immigration, and they are unstoppable. They’ve had 100 years of preparation ahead of us. Their effort...

What's up with so many Democrats wanting missile strikes on Syria, while Republicans balk? I'm told Republicans are the war party. Is this just hypocrisy? Politicians change their position on military intervention when their own party controls the White House? Historian Thaddeus Russell says it's not. He says it's always been "progressive" Democrats who led America into war: Woodrow Wilson in World War I, FDR in World War II, Truman in the Korean War, Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam and Bill Clinton in Somalia and Kosovo. Russell says the progressives like "nation-building" because it fits their view that government can...

It seemed like their growth was unstoppable... With a billion-person strong workforce and a vast quantity of resources at their bidding, China seems like an economic powerhouse... One that could overtake even the U.S. economy. It was an unseemly miracle — from a poor dictatorship to one of the fastest-growing capitalist systems in the world. But all is not well in the Middle Kingdom... Corruption. A massive housing bubble. A barrage of bad loans. Things are not looking good for China's economic future. Are we witnessing the end of a Chinese era, or is this just a bump in the...

This is the Weekly Investment & Finance Thread (Sept.-9-13 edition)----  Trying to focus on the markets for today and each day and the economic news  This is where you can exchange some investment opinions and advice If you see another FR economic thread you like and want to link to it here, please doPost your favorite economic site links. Your favorite economic blogs and precious metals blogs and sitesPing list -- on or off let me know here or via freep-mail. If I missed you then Freep-mail me I might ping you to other interesting economic threads a few times a...

This is the Weekly Investment & Finance Thread (Sept.-3-6 edition)----  Trying to focus on the markets for today and each day and the economic news This is where you can exchange some investment opinions and advice If you see another FR economic thread you like and want to link to it here, please doPost your favorite economic site links. Your favorite economic blogs and precious metals blogs and sitesPing list -- on or off let me know here or via freep-mail. If I missed you then Freep-mail me I might ping you to other interesting economic threads a few times a week....

"I was under the impression that the African slave trade was the sole responsibility of the Christian Europeans, the White race, that is until I started exploring the subject in great depth..."

Eye-catching numbers have emerged on the expected trade boom from the Arctic route to Europe for Chinese business.Cosco Shipping - part of China's state-owned shipping giant Cosco Group - announced its maiden voyage with a multi-purpose vessel last week. 'The ship left Dalian port in Northeast China's Liaoning province and is scheduled to take 33 days to reach Europe,' reported China Daily. 'It is the first time a Chinese merchant ship has travelled to Europe via the Arctic Northeast Passage. The total deadweight tonnage of the multipurpose vessel is 19,461 tons. The ship is expected to arrive in the Bering...

Monthly U.S. headlines trumpeting the death of inflation hide a painful truth for American families: rapidly rising food prices. News reports rarely mention this pain because economists' preferred inflation metric, so-called "core CPI," omits both food and energy due to concerns about their volatility. Although this omission might make sense from a purely economic perspective, it does a disservice to voters because several federal government policies that enrich a few special interests have conspired to keep American grocery bills high and rising. There can be little doubt that food prices have spiked in recent years, especially in relation to other...